To Rome With Love

Saw the new Woody Allen movie, To Rome With Love, at Chicago's Kerasotes Showplace Icon Theatre yesterday. Didn't enjoy it as much as "Midnight in Paris" but any movie with Rome as the backdrop, and actor Roberto Benigni, is worth watching in my book. The movie features Americans and Italians colliding in the Eternal City. I particularly enjoyed Roberto Benigni as an ordinary Roman guy who becomes famous for no reason and is hounded by the Paparazzi. He is pursued by models and actresses and interviewed about what he ate for breakfast....a comment on the vapidity of the West's obsession with "celebrity" and "people famous for being famous". The phrase “ozymandias melancholia” pops up twice...which I "think" refers to a sort of spiritual malaise of our times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.